In August 1999, the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission met in Accra, Ghana, West Africa. At the meeting, they issued a demand for reparations from "all those nations of Western Europe and the Americas and institutions that participated in and benefited from the slave trade and colonialism".
The sum suggested was US$777 trillion. The amount was agreed to be adequate then, based on estimates of human lives lost to Africa during the slave trade, as well as assessments of the worth of the gold, diamonds and other minerals taken from the continent during colonial rule.
In Durban, South Africa, in 2001, the idea for reparations was given some encouragement at the United Nations Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance.
The conference's final report "acknowledged" that slavery and slave trade were crimes against humanity, of which "people of African descent, Asians, and people of Asian and indigenous peoples" were "victims".
In another of the conference's declarations, "colonialism" was casually lumped together with "slavery, the slave trade, apartheid and genocide" in a blanket call to United Nations member states to "honour the memory of the victims of past tragedies".
The conference noted that "some states have taken the initiative to apologise and have paid reparation, where appropriate, for grave and massive violations committed" and "called on all those who have not yet contributed to restoring the dignity of the victims to find appropriate ways to do so".
Niel Ferguson's Empire, first published in 2003, brought to light Britain's imperial past. He reminded us that the calls have not gone unheeded in Britain.
We were told that in May 2002, the director of the London-based think tank Demos, which may be regarded then as the avant-garde of New Labour, suggested that the Queen embark on "a world tour to apologise for the past sins of empire as a first step to making the Commonwealth more effective and relevant".
The news agency that reported the suggestion added: "Critics of the British Empire, which, at its peak in 1918 covered a quarter of the world's population and area, say its huge wealth was built on oppression and exploitation." Such narratives are veiled in Malaysian history and historiography.
Consider the London-registered Tronoh Mines Ltd from the early 20th century; then the largest tin mining company in the world. We can think of how tin from the Malay Peninsula helped build the British empire.
In 2003, the BBC website, which Ferguson commented was apparently aimed at schoolchildren, offered an incisive overview of Britain's history. It is narrated that the "empire came to greatness by killing lots of people less sharply armed than themselves and stealing their countries, although their methods later changed".
The killing of people with machine guns came to prominence as the army's tactic of choice, but that "fell to pieces because of the various people like Mahatma Gandhi, a heroic revolutionary protester, sensitive to the needs of his people".
How did a people who thought themselves free end up subjugating so much of the world?
"How did an empire of the free become an empire of slaves?" asked a historian on BBC television. Good intentions gone wrong?
"Anglobalisation", as Ferguson put it, began as a primarily economic phenomenon.
This has given rise to pirates and gunboats, slavery and crimes, as well as the shrinking of the world via telegraph cables and the steamship.
And, there are cartography and the railway.
Ferguson's narrative favours the empire "…when Britain rules, and made, the modern world". What lessons can we, or do we want to learn after 65 years of "political decolonisation" in the Commonwealth?
Perhaps, the new king (Charles III) should pick up the 2002 suggestion for a "world tour" to begin a new narrative.